Free Republic

Millions of people around the world are emerging from poverty thanks to rising economic freedom. But by sharp contrast, America's economic freedom has been on a declining path over the past decade. According to the 2016 Index of Economic Freedom, an annual publication by The Heritage Foundation, America's economic freedom has tumbled. With losses of economic freedom in eight of the past nine years, the U.S. has tied its worst score ever, wiping out a decade of progress. The U.S. has fallen from the 6th freest economy in the world, when President Barack Obama took office, to 11th place in...

Why are small towns in conservative states being specifically targeted for refugee resettlement? Of course the Obama administration will never publicly admit that this is happening, but it doesn’t take a genius to figure out what is going on. Just look at the uproar that refugee resettlement is now causing in small communities in Idaho, Montana, North Dakota and Kansas. The Obama administration has deemed large cities such as Washington D.C. to be “too expensive” for the refugees, and so large numbers of them are being dispersed throughout smaller communities all over the nation. If you drop a few hundred...

Clinton campaign events are known for being highly scripted and at least some questions from Hillary’s audiences most certainly are plants, providing the candidate a setup to respond in such a way as to make her look like a really nice, downhome person or really on top of a particular subject. Such was the situation recently when a questioner at a Hillary Q&A seemingly admitted that he had been given his softball question for the frontrunner about which former president she most admired. Such situations are not new for Hillary with charges of planted questions arising in all of...

Deceit: Newly declassified transcripts show top defense officials who briefed Obama on the day of the Benghazi attack described it as a terrorist attack and told the president so, yet he pushed a false narrative about a video. Just as the new book by former Defense Secretary Bob Gates confirmed what many believed, that President Obama was a politically motivated commander-in-chief who had no faith in an Afghan surge he put 30,000 Americans in harm's way to execute, transcripts of congressional testimony by military leaders confirm that President Obama knew Benghazi was a terrorist attack before he went to bed...

Five hundred and fifty Syrian refugees have been admitted into the United States since the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS/ISIL) carried out terrorist attacks in Paris last November, and of those, two (0.3 percent) are Christians. Over the past week, another 24 Syrian refugees have been admitted, including one male Orthodox Christian. The religious breakdown of the 550 is 534 Sunni Muslims, three Shi'ites, ten others identified in State Department Refugee Processing Center data as simply "Moslems," one Orthodox Christian, one Greek Orthodox Christian, and one refugee identified as "other religion." The two Christians are both male, as...

With real GDP growth last year coming in at 2.4%, President Obama has now managed to miss every single growth target he'd set for himself since taking office. If a CEO performed that badly, his reputation would be in ruins. When Obama came into office, he would often publicly complain about CEOs being paid too much. "What gets people upset -- and rightfully so -- are executives being rewarded for failure," he said at press conference in early 2009. Later he opined that "the compensation packages that we've seen over the last decade at least have not matched up always...

With the presidential race the focus of most of the media attention, a major division among Senate Republicans over so-called "criminal justice reform" has gotten little attention. But the liberal media are now beginning to notice that conservatives are mounting a campaign to stop a piece of legislation that has been advertised as a major part of President Obama's left-wing legacy. The Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act (S. 2123) would release thousands of criminals back on the streets at a time of rising crime rates, in the name of reducing what liberals call "mass incarceration."

The State Department on Friday said for the first time that “top secret” material had been sent through Hillary Clinton’s private computer server, and that it would not make public 22 of her emails because they contained highly classified information. The department announced that 18 emails exchanged between Mrs. Clinton and President Obama would also be withheld, citing the longstanding practice of preserving presidential communications for future release. The department’s spokesman, John Kirby, said that exchanges did not involve classified information.

As a result of the fall of Ramadi and other Sunni areas in Iraq to the forces of ISIS, many critics are blaming President Obama for “losing Iraq.” According to his critics, for example, people like Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and columnist Charles Krauthammer, if Obama had only left thousands of American troops in Iraq after 2011, there would be no ISIS or Iranian-dominated Shiite militias in Iraq. The Iraqi military would be a well-trained, well-disciplined, and well-equipped fighting force, willing and able to defend their country. This view, though widely-shared by the more hawkish conservatives, is an exercise in...

It is stunningly clear that Obama is a muslim who hates America's traditional values and is intent on destroying America as all of us patriots know it. Hillary Clinton is just another Marxist like Obama who is more interested in fattening her own wallet than giving a damn about what happens to our country. HOW CAN ANYBODY BE SO STUPID AS TO VOTE FOR EITHER ONE OF THESE P.O.S. WHO WANT TO RUIN OUR COUNTRY??????????????????????????????????

Wartime U.S. presidents have taken keen personal interest in picking the most lethal gun for the military. But in President Obama's first foray into small-arms procurement for the armed forces, his Jan. 4 executive order on gun control directs the Pentagon to find ways to make not so much more lethal firearms, but safer ones. His direct order has brought a few snickers among retired combatants who argue that the commander in chief is issuing his directive at a time of more pressing small-arms priorities. The military, critics say, fields a flawed personal rifle and has spent more than a...

Video - Comedian exposes idiots in California who say they'd happily eat at "The Holocaust Bar and Grill" Via our friends at Bare Naked Islam: If there was any doubt that educational standards have fallen, particularly in history departments, this should dispel any doubt. Obama, meanwhile, has welcomed Holocaust-denying Iran back into league with civilized nations. Zyklon B Sauce, anyone? Video direct on Youtube https://youtu.be/9d4mIaINKqo

WASHINGTON - U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry called the nearly five-year Syria conflict that has killed 250,000, wounded more than a million and displaced millions as an "unfolding humanitarian catastrophe unmatched since World War II."

Election 2016 is about the turnaround survival or continuing downfall of Western Society as we know it. The 2016 presidential race is not about whether Donald Trump would make a better president than Senator Ted Cruz. It’s not about Fox News, nor about the shameful way the ‘journalists’ of the day now ‘moderate’ presidential debates. It’s not about the latest National Enquirer type, 11th-hour smear, lies and claimed Sainthood. That was both the 2008 and 2012 election. The 2016 election is about the possibility of releasing the USA from its lockdown of hatred; a hatred that has all but swiped...

Barack Obama is in the final stretch of his time as President of the United States. It was announced on Sunday that Obama will make his first public appearance at a U.S. mosque to show solidarity with Muslims, whom many blame for all those terrorist attacks they commit. The White House announced that Obama would be visiting the Islamic Society of Baltimore, which is located in Woodlawn, Maryland, just west of Baltimore. The ISB started in 1969 as a prayer group at Johns Hopkins University, which is located in Baltimore, according to the mosque’s website. A little more than a...

President Obama is set to speak next week at a mosque which was led for over a decade by an Imam who justified suicide bombings in some circumstances and who helped found a mosque with ties to Al Qaeda. The President will visit the Islamic Society of Baltimore on Wednesday and deliver remarks there, the White House confirmed on Saturday. This will be the first time the President has paid an official visit to a mosque during his seven years as President. However, Obama has toured mosques while on overseas trips. "The president believes that one of our nation's greatest...

President Barack Obama says he'll ask Congress for billions in new spending to help students learn computer science skills. Obama announced the plan in his weekly radio and Internet address on Saturday. He says developing analytical and coding skills is a must for jobs in the new economy. ...

More than 1 million low-income residents in 21 states could soon lose their government food stamps if they fail to meet work requirements that began kicking in this month. The rule change in the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program was triggered by the improving economy - specifically, falling unemployment. But it is raising concerns among the poor, social service providers and food pantry workers, who fear an influx of hungry people. Recent experience in other states indicates that most of those affected will probably not meet the work requirements and will be cut off from food stamps. ...

Fifteen years into the war that few Americans talk about any more, conditions in Afghanistan are getting worse, preventing the clean ending that President Barack Obama hoped to impose before leaving office. Violence is on the rise, the Taliban are staging new offensives, the Islamic State group is angling for a foothold and peace prospects are dim. Afghanistan remains a danger zone. It's hobbled by a weak economy that's sapping public confidence in the new government. Afghan police and soldiers are struggling to hold together the country 13 months after the U.S.-led military coalition culled its numbers by 90 percent....

Here’s a story which seemed to get lost in the shuffle this month, what with so many other alerts devouring the news cycle. A memo was sent out from the Obama administration early in January directing a change to how products from Israel are labeled. As Adam Kredo at the Washington Free Beacon explains, this has riled up many folks on both sides of the aisle. A memo issued earlier this month by the Obama administration directs the U.S. "trade community" and government partner agencies to explicitly label Israeli-made goods that have been produced in the West Bank.The Jan. 23...